Slashdot Mirror

• Magazine Man which is, supposedly, written by the editor of a major magazine.
• The Misadventures of the Little Hedonist which the author admits is, at least partially, fictional. Sometimes his spelling is iffy but the stories are usually pretty entertaining.

Allow me to specify a set of web sites I NEVER want to results for.
Allow me to specify that I never want to see another damn .doc or .pdf file again.

You could add those to Google yourself with relatively simple Javascript (Greasemonkey, userjs, etc). Just append "-site:example.com -filetype:pdf" to each query.

DON'T HIDE THE GOD DAMN DELETE FEATURE UNDER A MENU!

Here's a Greasemonkey script to add a delete button.

How about it could come with an integrated tool that stops other toolbars from being installed? That'd be fantastic then I could just put it on my family's computers and not worry about them installing more tool bars, or any software for that matter!

I thought there was an option to disable BHOs in the latest Internet Explorer running on XP? In any case, Internet Explorer 7 will have a "safe mode". I don't think this is Google's problem to solve.

Integrate a clock, people like clocks!

Everyone has a clock.

From The Official IE Blog's statement...
"Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release."

Raymend Chen has an entry about it on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/08/ 24/455558.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/ 08/54817.aspx

And I happen to know that Cringe A) got the info from a vaguely anonymous email; B) published it with no confirmation; and C) received the email below:

>To: bob@cringely.com
>Date: 5 Jul 95 09:28:27 -0700
>From: yusufm
>X-Exchange-Message-Id: C=US;A=
>;P=MICROSOFT;l=RED-10-MSG950705092827FIX00A501
>Subject: 7/3 Notes From Field
>
>The dongle thingamajig you wrote up is of course not correct. No such
> thing required or in the box to use Windows 95. One of your more
>whacky rumours...did you really believe it?
>
>Yusuf Mehdi
>Product Manager, Windows 95
>Microsoft

How do I know this? ;-) I still have the original emails filed away from 10 years ago.

MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.

Oh really? Perhaps you should go get a clue about Monad. If you have trouble reading, you can even watch a pretty moving picture.

Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more .NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.

This is, in fact, far ahead of anything currently available on Unix or Windows. In fact, it's so far ahead of what is currently available it will take quite a long time to get all parts of the OS and the apps that run on top of it to fully support the concepts Monad introduces. It's pretty damn innovative, if you ask me.

Oh, and it runs quite well for vaporware. I've been running it for a couple of months now (in beta form) and it's pretty damn cool.

I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.

Ya, when you're making shit up you can pump it out like a champ.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1038 44

Linus is still asking for $200-$5000 per usage from Australian companies. I noticed Slashdot never updated the story after implying it was a hoax. It is not a hoax.

This is an ad, intended to drive site traffic. Not to say Hemos understood it to be as such, but it definitely is. (If you look at the "About us" on the feed page, you'll see that they also own "NotePage", the the site listed as the submitter's homepage.)

It's not so bad that this story was approved as an ad, but rather it's so poorly written and poorly understood by the author. After announcing support for RSS, MS's Longhorn team bent over backwards to explain that they were supporting Atom too. The rest of it really is a long winded way to say that part of Google started using RSS in addition to Atom (not instead of!). In fact, I've no idea what point he's even making with Blogger, as they continue to use Atom!

Give the utter crap of this post, the only thing that surprised me was that it was posted by timothy!

-Bill

That check-in completes Longhorn support for the different syndication formats. The grand total is: RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0.
However, just to set expectations, we locked down on Beta 1 of Longhorn about a month ago, so the release of Longhorn that will be public soon won't have Atom support, but the bits we'll have at PDC in September, and in Beta 2 will have it.

I posted a response to this "article" earlier today which I am just going to paste here:

Normally I try to avoid these articles, but Sharon Housley's RSS Won the Syndication Standards Battle is one I can't avoid. She claims that RSS has overtaken Atom because of support (or lack there of) for RSS by Microsoft and Google.

Sharon began by saying Microsoft had dumped Atom in favour for RSS. Is it just me or did Microsoft not say that they will support Atom almost 3 weeks ago? She says that Google News feeds having both RSS and Atom is a sign of weakness in the format, even though Google-owned Blogger (and Atom supporter) has always provided a link to FeedBurner for those who prefer RSS instead of Atom. Having both RSS and Atom on Google News isn't a sign that RSS is dominating so much as it is Google providing a choice of format to users. By the way, podcasting is not limited to RSS 2.0 as Atom supports Podcasting in a way that is arguably more powerful than RSS's. Microsoft's lists, another RSS innovation, are also easily done with Atom. Don't forget that the IETF approved the propsed Atom standard while RSS has been fragmented many times by different authors.

With Microsoft calling its support for syndication web feeds, Google refering to them as feeds on Google News and web clips on Google Desktop 2 (as Brad Hill mentions in Google Shuns the RSS Name) it seems likely that other sites will offer syndication through a generic name in more than one format. How all of this can be viewed as RSS winning any kind of standards battle is baffling.

Dana

"Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release."

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280 .aspx

Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.

(Picking up where the first set of sarcasm left off...)

None whatsoever. Not even Microsoft will touch it. Oh, wait!

For those who'd rather not read the article, it's from the Longhorn RSS team blog, and it's titled "Longhorn (hearts) Atom, too."

"When they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS, it seems a bit self-righteous; moreover, presumptuous that Google is simply writing off Atom."

No kidding, given the rest of the facts:

Microsoft already stated that they would be using xml namespaces to add to RSS. Which is exactly what Dave Winer who published RSS 2.0 intended. Microsoft actually consulted Dave before getting very far too. Quote: "Anyway, there's a lot more to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. "

Additionally, Microsoft has stated support for Atom as well.

Heh.

from:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/

"
Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release.
"

User identities are confirmed by using an Authentication Package. All of the packages that Windows includes require the user's password or smartcard interaction. It is documented how to write a new package; it is possible to create a package that would allow an administrator to act with the authority of any user. No one has done so AFAIK, and it doesn't look too simple.

An even easier way to impersonate a user on the local system is to manufacture a token: tokens are used to identify the authority behind a process. Anyone with TCB privilege (SYSTEM by default) can directly manufacture a token using NtCreateToken that contains user and group identities of whomever you want. This only works on the local system, though.

This is another case of the underlying system being capable, but Microsoft dropping the ball at a later stage. I think the justification for not being able to impersonate other users is the same as for not being able to assign ownership of objects to other users, except to restore backups.

About processes you can't kill: see the latest Sysinternals blog entry. It's due to buggy drivers that don't cancel IRPs correctly: a process can't exit until all of its IO is canceled. As for deleting files, that's a property of the locking system. You can still rename the files, though. That's what SFU does.

3x the # of web sites hosted perhaps, but not in terms of actual web servers.

Remember the Port 80 survey for example?

We must not also forget the # of vulnerabilities for Apache vs IIS6 where in such a battle, IIS6 is winning.

MS Team99 is re-forming. This time it is focusing on blogs. With a little effort you can find out what it was doing before. A few weeks before and after the announcement, there were basically no pro-MS / anti-OSS rants. Coincidence. Sure! I believe that. Really.

Although MS has been more careful not to get caught (or squelch news of getting caught) there have been repeated incidents in the past where they have been using people hired directly to astroturf both with paper letters and on the WWW. MS has also done this indirectly, so that people can claim "I'm not working for Microsoft" when they write.

In one notable incident, astroturfing was used by MS' PR firm Edelman generate newsclips to help Microsoft lobbyists persuade U.S. state attorney generals not to join a class action against the company. In another, form letters from deceased registered voters or voters from non-existent towns flooded government officials to defend MS. It goes on.

Then there is the issue of shills like Enderle and DiDio. People just don't praise MS without personal gain in mind.

Besides, if MS products were so good, then it wouldn't be prohibited in the EULA to benchmark them, right? It's good that Oregon is taking another step forward. This Open Source conference will at least generate discussion of valid issues which nowadays include not only the technical merits of individual tools, but also the methods by which they gain or hold marketshare.

Here's a story of some peeps from Microsoft Product Support Services who got a call about a weird crash in Exchange; tracked it down with the debugger, and found a pretty well-hidden rootkit. In fact, it would've remained hidden if it didn't have a bug in it!

Don't believe everything the debugger is telling you!!! (aka Rootkit)

Ah, I've read the text wrongly, my apologies.

No problem.

I don't know about Mac, but I kow for sure that IE 5+ (windows version) had poorly implemented CSS.

Yep. Fortunately for Mac users, Internet Explorer for the Mac is entirely different to Internet Explorer for Windows - it's a completely different codebase.

I also doubt that IE 7 will fix those issues and follow the W3 path, rumors are already circuling the web.

Pay no attention to rumours. Internet Explorer 7 will have much better support for CSS. It won't fix everything, but it's a big step forward (or, rather, it will be a big step forward in about five years time when most people have upgraded).

man do i hate ie

Read Brian Jones' (manager of MS Word development group) blog and the comments (esp. June/July archive IIRC). The OASIS standard looks like OOo because MS declined to take part in its development. Then they turned around and claimed that since OASIS doesn't do what they need, they to have to develop a competing XML file format in Office 12.

What makes you think the OASIS standard is even worth supporting?

EU encouragement?

I googled and found instructions here.

Transactional NTFS is still slated for inclusion in Windows Vista.

Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.

To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.

Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.

Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).

Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.

To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.

Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.

Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).

Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.

To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.

Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.

Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).

Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.

To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.

Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.

Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).

Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.

To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.

Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.

Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).

Paint.NET is a very nice PhotoShop-like open source graphics program.

Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems.

http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/archive/2004/09/03/ 225514.aspx

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Gr aphic-Editors/Paint-NET.shtml

Or not.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7562 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7592 4
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7617 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7698 7

Or not.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7562 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7592 4
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7617 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7698 7

Or not.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7562 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7592 4
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7617 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7698 7

Or not.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7562 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7592 4
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7617 3
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=7698 7

Channel 9 interview w/ the dev team here.

www.start.com/3 was up before google's version they are just being very quiet about it. There were also 2 releases prior to that that are still available. www.start.com/1 www.start.com/2 There is a Channel 9 video about it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9

Larry Osterman, who's been at MS for over 20 years now, clears that up for you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/0 8/12/213681.aspx

I can't speak as to why the AARD code was obfuscated, I have no explanation for that, it seems totally stupid to me. But I've got to say that I totally agree with the basic concept of Windows checking for an alternative version of MS-DOS and refusing to run on it.

The thing is that the Windows team had a problem to solve, and they didn't care how they solved it. Windows decided that it owned every part of the system, including the internal data structures of the operating system. It knew where those structures were located, it knew what the size of those data structures was, and it had no compunction against replacing those internal structures with its own version. Needless to say, from a DOS developer's standpoint, keeping Windows working was an absolute nightmare.

As a simple example, when Windows started up, it increased the size of MS-DOS's internal file table (the SFT, that's the table that was created by the FILES= line in config.sys). It did that to allow more than 20 files to be opened on the windows system (a highly desirable goal for a multi-tasking operating system). But it did that by using an undocumented API call, which returned a pointer to a set of "interesting" pointers in MS-DOS. It then indexed a known offset relative to that pointer, and replaced the value of the master SFT table with its own version of the SFT. When I was working on MS-DOS 4.0, we needed to support Windows. Well, it was relatively easy to guarantee that our SFT was at the location that Windows was expecting. But the problem was that the MS-DOS 4.0 SFT was 2 bytes larger than the MS-DOS 3.1 SFT. In order to get Windows to work, I had to change the DOS loader to detect when win.com was being loaded, and if it was being loaded, I looked at the code at an offset relative to the base code segment, and if it was a "MOV" instruction, and the amount being moved was the old size of the SFT, I patched the instruction in memory to reflect the new size of the SFT! Yup, MS-DOS 4.0 patched the running windows binary to make sure Windows would still continue to work.

Now then, considering how sleazy Windows was about MS-DOS, think about what would happen if Windows ran on a clone of MS-DOS. It's already groveling internal MS-DOS data structures. It's making assumptions about how our internal functions work, when it's safe to call them (and which ones are reentrant and which are not). It's assuming all SORTS of things about the way that MS-DOS's code works.

And now we're going to run it on a clone operating system. Which is different code. It's a totally unrelated code base.

If the clone operating system isn't a PERFECT clone of MS-DOS (not a good clone, a perfect clone), then Windows is going to fail in mysterious and magical ways. Your app might lose data. Windows might corrupt the hard disk.

Given the degree with which Windows performed extreme brain surgery on the innards of MS-DOS, it's not unreasonable for Windows to check that it was operating on the correct patient.

Wanna know why they didnt just remove the code from the final release? Chris Pratley explains that too:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/0 2/05/67871.aspx

A last anecdote to leave you with. Even re-linking your code (not even recompile) can introduce a crashing bug. A few years ago, we were working on the release candidate for an Asian-language version of Word97. We thought we were done, and ran our last optimization on the build. We have some technology at Microsoft that profiles code usage and arranges the code modules so that they are in the executable in the optimal order to produce the best possible boot speed. Afte

Larry Osterman, who's been at MS for over 20 years now, clears that up for you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/0 8/12/213681.aspx

I can't speak as to why the AARD code was obfuscated, I have no explanation for that, it seems totally stupid to me. But I've got to say that I totally agree with the basic concept of Windows checking for an alternative version of MS-DOS and refusing to run on it.

The thing is that the Windows team had a problem to solve, and they didn't care how they solved it. Windows decided that it owned every part of the system, including the internal data structures of the operating system. It knew where those structures were located, it knew what the size of those data structures was, and it had no compunction against replacing those internal structures with its own version. Needless to say, from a DOS developer's standpoint, keeping Windows working was an absolute nightmare.

As a simple example, when Windows started up, it increased the size of MS-DOS's internal file table (the SFT, that's the table that was created by the FILES= line in config.sys). It did that to allow more than 20 files to be opened on the windows system (a highly desirable goal for a multi-tasking operating system). But it did that by using an undocumented API call, which returned a pointer to a set of "interesting" pointers in MS-DOS. It then indexed a known offset relative to that pointer, and replaced the value of the master SFT table with its own version of the SFT. When I was working on MS-DOS 4.0, we needed to support Windows. Well, it was relatively easy to guarantee that our SFT was at the location that Windows was expecting. But the problem was that the MS-DOS 4.0 SFT was 2 bytes larger than the MS-DOS 3.1 SFT. In order to get Windows to work, I had to change the DOS loader to detect when win.com was being loaded, and if it was being loaded, I looked at the code at an offset relative to the base code segment, and if it was a "MOV" instruction, and the amount being moved was the old size of the SFT, I patched the instruction in memory to reflect the new size of the SFT! Yup, MS-DOS 4.0 patched the running windows binary to make sure Windows would still continue to work.

Now then, considering how sleazy Windows was about MS-DOS, think about what would happen if Windows ran on a clone of MS-DOS. It's already groveling internal MS-DOS data structures. It's making assumptions about how our internal functions work, when it's safe to call them (and which ones are reentrant and which are not). It's assuming all SORTS of things about the way that MS-DOS's code works.

And now we're going to run it on a clone operating system. Which is different code. It's a totally unrelated code base.

If the clone operating system isn't a PERFECT clone of MS-DOS (not a good clone, a perfect clone), then Windows is going to fail in mysterious and magical ways. Your app might lose data. Windows might corrupt the hard disk.

Given the degree with which Windows performed extreme brain surgery on the innards of MS-DOS, it's not unreasonable for Windows to check that it was operating on the correct patient.

Wanna know why they didnt just remove the code from the final release? Chris Pratley explains that too:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/0 2/05/67871.aspx

A last anecdote to leave you with. Even re-linking your code (not even recompile) can introduce a crashing bug. A few years ago, we were working on the release candidate for an Asian-language version of Word97. We thought we were done, and ran our last optimization on the build. We have some technology at Microsoft that profiles code usage and arranges the code modules so that they are in the executable in the optimal order to produce the best possible boot speed. Afte

If you look at the sandbox.msn.com homepage you can see Start.com/1 was launched in March. Theres also the video!.

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1
- April 6th, http://start.com/2
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
  - March 6th, http://start.com/1
  - April 6th, http://start.com/2
  - May 20th(?), google's personalized page
  - June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve

It is not an insult to say that the page is similar to Google's. They acknowledge that Google was an inspiration. You aren't calling anyone out by saying so.

Watch the interview with the development team here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9152 6

http://www.start.com/1/ and http://www.start.com/2/ have been out long before Google's homepage (evidence: http://spaces.msn.com/members/startcom/). I would argue that Google is doing the copying here. Google admits that theirs came out in May (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/more-of-wh at-i-want.html).

For a video to see two of only three people who work on start.com, you can go here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9

Yes, Microsoft has only two developers on this project.

1. OOOH, another Microsoft product to bash!
2. Go to site
3. Look furously for any mistakes or problems no matter how small.
4. Post on slashdot: MICROSOFT SUCKS!!! LINUX RULEZ! We are l33t hax0rs!!!

This particular site has been live for over 2 months. Start.com is a MS testbed. There are other versions of portals hidden on their site. MSN Search Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/default.aspx

Open minds will listen to all perspectives before judging. Everyone should have their chance to speak, not just the people whose words are nice or pretty. Unfortunately, it's not always possible to receive exposure to multiple points of view, especially when those views do not conform to the local social norm.

For example, let's take the story about boycotting IE7. The point of that particular blurb is that IE7 has no intention of passing Acid2 on initial release, so people should use something else that is about to or aiming to feature Acid2 compliance. If you read the developer's blog that one post links and contrast that to what people were saying in other posts, you'll quickly realize that the reality is that passing Acid2 is not on the development team's priorities. Instead, securing the browser and providing additional security features is.

My point is that the way we view things depends on our priorities. While I am a big fan of Firefox myself (I'm especially fond of the Adblock extension), I don't see Acid2 compliance as a reasonable justification for boycotting IE7. Sure, web developers will code to the lowest common denominator, thus making everyone's internet experience a little less enjoyable. But, when given a choice of whether to have Microsoft come out with a Acid2 compliant browser or one that keeps Joe Sixpack from getting his identity stolen by a phishing site, I think I would prefer the latter.

Whether MS will be successful in making IE7 airtight, or that the new features will be at all effective is another story. And if IE7 doesn't live up to its hype, then I will start calling it a piece of shrimp stool so vile its very existence creates a dead zone.

For the same reason, I'm very interested in reading what these Linux gurus in Microsoft have to say. What they say might not necessarily be agreeable, and I know of at least one major difference between us (I have no intention of compromising what I stand for for the sake of survival), still, I will not even attempt to discredit what they have to say until I have first heard it. And, if they throw in a few pieces of PR BS every now and again, well, I'm confident I have enough intelligence and knowledge to see through any such attempts. And quite frankly, I'm sure there are many others here who do too.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx

IE7 will *not* pass the acid2 test, they were not even trying.

All this IE won't pass the Acid test on purpose hype is a little out of control. Where that comes from is this article from yesterday where the IE developer says:

our top priority is (and will likely always be) security

First, let's be happy about that. Obviously the more serious problem with IE is the security issues.

He then says:

I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended).

and further more:

It's pointedly not a compliance test (from the Test Guide: "Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"

So neither the author nor half of slashdot read anymore then the hyped up Slashdot headline. He specifically says they will be fully compliant and are making that a large issue. Cripes, if you want to have credibility, at least get the real facts straight.

Chris Wilson blogged about IE7's current and future expectations for (not) passing the Acid2 browser test:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx

Its noted that IE7 Beta1 doesn't do much for improved web standards support, IE7 Beta2 will fix some bugs and at no point will IE7 pass the Acid test.

Considering they have http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242 .aspx already stated that IE is moving towards standards compliance, I think he is jumping the gun a bit here. Internet Explorer is just now moving towards being operable in a developer environment and should be recieving our blessings that it will succeed in order for web developer's nightmares to subside.